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  MadNihilist 21:44 on November 22, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Ça alors !, France, Lit, People, Politics, Sarko

  Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus

  

  French intellectuals have heaped scorn on a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to bestow the country’s greatest posthumous honour upon the writer Albert Camus, accusing the rightwing president of trying to cash in on the thinker’s popularity with little respect for his politics or personality.

  Sarkozy said in Brussels last week that he thought it would be an “extraordinary symbol” to transfer the Algerian-born author’s remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.

  “I thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice,” he told journalists, while cautioning that no decision had yet been taken. “[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart.” An Élysée adviser, Georges-Marc Benamou, told journalists last month that Camus’s “non-conformism in relation to France’s elites” appealed to the president, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who prides himself on not having come from the conventional politician’s background.

  But the idea of a rightwing leader often accused of authoritarian tendencies and anti-intellectualism celebrating the life of a man who made a career out of political resistance and literary endeavour has outraged many Camus experts.

  They suspect Sarkozy is using a golden opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of a charismatic hero, whose ideas are being feted by the mainstream half a century after he died in a car crash. (…)

  (Hat tip: Keith Hart)

  _______________________

  Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

   

• MadNihilist 10:35 on November 22, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Books

  The Letters of T S Eliot: review

  

  “Practically, one crucifies oneself and entertains drawing rooms and lounges.” This sentence by T S Eliot on the reception of his extraordinary, agonised poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a thrilling moment in the long-awaited second volume of his letters. It rings like a line from one of his earlier poems, in which suffering figures suddenly see themselves in the absurd light of polite society. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” rued Eliot’s alter ego J Alfred Prufrock in 1917. Eight years later, he might have added: “and headed notepaper”.

  The first volume of Eliot’s letters, which covered the period from early youth up to both “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, appeared 21 years ago. It was edited, as he requested, by his second wife, Valerie Eliot, formerly his secretary at Faber & Faber. The sequel only covers another three years, up to Eliot’s professional move from Lloyd’s Bank to the publishing house. But it was evidently proving an overwhelming task, and she has now been joined by the scholar Hugh Haughton, who has also revised and expanded the first volume by about 200 pages.

  Eliot’s original wish to leave his letters unpublished was unrealistic. The world’s most eminent man of letters could hardly expect his correspondence to be buried with him, not least because this would have required the excavation of a small churchyard. By asking his young widow to oversee their appearance, however, Eliot presumably hoped for some discretion, such as he had already exercised by burning his early letters to his parents. The problem this created was a widespread suspicion that the most revealing material – especially in relation to his unhappy first marriage, and his debated anti-Semitism – was being suppressed.

  (…)

   
• 

  Maurice 22:42 on November 21, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Energy, Food, Thought

  The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
  or why each calorie we eat uses one hundred oil calories; gluttony redefined

  (Harpers, Richard Manning)

  About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

  

  It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam—sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today—double what nutritionists recommend.About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

  It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam—sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today—double what nutritionists recommend.

  (…)

   
• 

  MadNihilist 11:09 on November 21, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Art, US

  Let It Bleed

  

  In 1969, we were very free. I turned twenty-seven—too old to be a hippie, after having been too young to pull off being a beatnik—and was so free as to be practically useless, writing just enough to finance days abed in a tiny Sullivan Street apartment, where I convalesced from many drugs, a broken marriage, and other ills of frenetic years on the downtown poetry and art scenes. I almost roused myself to attend Woodstock. Nixon became President. Vietnam churned on. Tidings of the Manson family and the Weathermen intensified a sense of concatenating disaster. Black Power, nascent feminism, and Stonewall discomfited straight white guys like me. (Being on the side of the angels is hard when the angels are mad at you.) In the art world, “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970,” which opened in 1969, at the Metropolitan Museum, and was curated by the owlish hipster Henry Geldzahler, summarized swiftly receding glories. Philip Guston, whose hypersensitive abstractions I had revered, was painting R. Crumb-like goofball imagery, for which it would take me more than a decade to forgive him. After a psychedelic efflorescence, color died. This I’ve confirmed on visits to “1969,” a huge show of works from the Museum of Modern Art’s collections, at P.S. 1, the museum’s affiliate in Long Island City. A grayer affair, in mood as in hue, cannot be imagined. It vivifies a reign of asceticism that followed upon our surfeit of freedom. Spiritual hair shirts were in fashion.

  The avant-garde movements of the time were post-minimalism and Conceptual art. Reacting against Pop and minimalism, they steered serious art into mazes of self-reference that it has not escaped to this day. (The march of progressive styles since Impressionism was over.) The year’s most original artists were the post-minimalists Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra—and Eva Hesse, whose work is annoyingly absent from “1969.” They founded their art in the absurdity, and the necessity, of making formal decisions. Two grainy videos show Nauman, alone in his California studio, walking with arbitrary determination and wielding a lit fluorescent tube. In a film shot with an industrial high-speed camera, he pulls his mouth agape with his fingers; in another, he yanks a streamer of gauze from his mouth. more…

   

• MadNihilist 16:00 on November 20, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Climate Change, Thought

  The climate of history: Four theses

  The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: “Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. [...] Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. [...] Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? [...] Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?” I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert ourselves into a future “without us” in order to be able to visualize it. Thus, our usual historical practices for visualizing times, past and future, times inaccessible to us personally – the exercise of historical understanding – are thrown into a deep contradiction and confusion. Weisman’s experiment indicates how such confusion follows from our contemporary sense of the present insofar as that present gives rise to concerns about our future. Our historical sense of the present, in Weisman’s version, has thus become deeply destructive of our general sense of history.

  I will return to Weisman’s experiment in the last part of this essay. There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called “the birth of the modern world”.[2] Indeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post-imperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the post-war scenario of decolonization and globalization.

  (…)

   

• MadNihilist 13:30 on November 20, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Landscape, Memory, Photography, Place

  The Fall

  

  [Image: Richard Mosse, "Grand Voyager Sunni Triangle" (2009), courtesy of the Jack Shainman Gallery].

  For the past year, Mosse has been traveling the world on a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship, documenting distant sites of aviation wreckage, war ruins, and more. From Iraqi battlefields and ruined palaces to bullet-riddled trucks and disaster-preparation test-landscapes, his new exhibition, The Fall, “is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious,” the gallery explains.

  Mosse travelled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.

  (…)

   

• MadNihilist 11:44 on November 20, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: Books, Debates, People, Science, Thought

  Why do I care so much about the Malcolm Gladwell issue?

  Here is Michael Anissimov’s take on ‘The Gladwell Issue’ –an articulate response indeed:

  Why do I care so much about the Malcolm Gladwell issue? First is the matter of scientific integrity in journalism. Science-oriented folks care about it, and most everyone else doesn’t. For instance, here is John Horgan from Slate:

  Almost four years ago, an esteemed science journalist — OK, it was me — suggested that the days of truly momentous scientific discovery might be over. One symptom of science’s plight, I predicted, would be that my fellow science writers would become increasingly desperate for and willing to invent “revolutionary” theories. To my delight, Malcolm Gladwell has provided the most spectacular confirmation of my hypothesis to date.

  Compare this to the Columbia Journalism Review:

  The answer to this charge is: Of course Gladwell lacks rigor – he’s a feature writer, not a brain scientist. Why some people – including the corporate titans who pay Gladwell’s speaking fees – seem confused about this I haven’t a clue. I can’t also help but wonder what would prompt the Times to haul out the heavy gun that is Pinker to shoot down a collection of magazine miscellany.

  The reason why is that the way in which we think about probability and statistics determines the way we model the world, and the way we model the world profoundly effects the way we think, behave, and solve problems. A faulty map, like the kind that Gladwell spreads to millions of powerful and wealthy people, causes us to collectively trip and fall in the territory. The only problem is that the more of us use the faulty map, the easier it is to write off our faulty navigation based on uncontrolled external factors. This is groupthink on a stupendous scale. We have trouble identifying our mistakes if we all make them in the same way.

  I am not a scientist. I didn’t even attend college for more than a few classes. I don’t pretend to be a scientist, but I do form science-based opinions based on the results reported by real scientists, whom I admire. But the real people with power in this world are journalists and politicians, not scientists. As an online journalist/intellectual type with more than 1,500 short popsci articles under my belt, I see my task as spreading scientific literacy to as many people as possible, and by extension the people in power, so they can make decisions based on empirical evidence and not folk theories. I see a responsibility to scientists and researchers to absorb as much of their material as I can and translate it into non-specialist language that any educated person can digest.

  (…)

   

• MadNihilist 02:27 on November 20, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Art, Cities, People

  
  Jeanne-Claude dies aged 74

  

  Artist Jeanne-Claude, who created the 2005 Central Park installation The Gates and other large scale ‘wrapping’ projects around the globe with her husband Christo, has died. She was 74.

  Jeanne-Claude died last night at a New York hospital from complications of a brain aneurysm, her family said in an e-mail statement.

  Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he spoke with Christo this morning and offered condolences on behalf of all New Yorkers.

  The Gates festooned 23 miles (37 kilometers) of Central Park’s footpaths with thousands of saffron drapes hung from specially designed frames.

  More than 5 million people saw The Gates, and it was credited with injecting about $254 million into the local economy.

  Christo the more famous of the duo was saddened, the family statement said, but remains “committed to honour the promise they made to each other many years ago: that the art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude would continue.”

  (…)

   

• MadNihilist 21:30 on November 19, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: China, Civil Liberties, Media, Obama

  The case of the missing Obama front page

  

  The Southern Weekly, one of China’s more aggressively investigative newspapers, were the only print media outlet to get an interview with Obama. Central government controlled Xinhua and CCTV did not get one-on-one interviews with the American president.

  The interview was published in this week’s issue which came out today.

  You can read a translation into English of the interview on Daily Telegraph Shanghai correspondent Malcolm’s Moore’s blog.

  This afternoon, several journalists and news assistants at foreign media organizations reported on Twitter that their copies of the paper arrived today without the front page, on the back of which was the Obama interview. As Malcolm Moore points out, the interview “appears to have been carefully checked by the Propaganda ministry. Nothing controversial was published.”

  So who removed the front pages from the news bureaux’ subscription copies, and why?

  Who knows, but well-known Chinese journalist and blogger Michael Anti noted “Media, if you wanna understand complexity of Southern Weekend’s Obama interview, pls translate this tweet“

  Rendered into English (with some help from Anti), the tweet in question by shifeike is:

  Analysis of the results of Southern Weekly’s intimate contact with Obama: The Central Publicity (neé Propaganda) Department is furious, state media is jealous, Southern Weekly is wild with joy, the Guangdong Party secretary is nervous, Southern Weekly editor Xiang Xi cried hard to get a new big chance, [former editor of Caijing Hu] Shuli is depressed.

   

• MadNihilist 21:00 on November 19, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: ICT, Social Networks

  You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato
  
  How social networks influence our behavior and outlook

   

  Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 352 pp., $25.99)

  Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list.

  Yet the history of humanity is a history of social networking all the same, according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. “Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives,” they write. “How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us.” And the burgeoning field of network research is revealing that “our connections do not end with the people we know.” Social networks take on lives of their own, transmitting information, germs, and habits between people who are nearly as tangentially linked as actors in the old parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. “Friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us,” the authors argue, “like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”

  Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Fowler, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, gained fame a few years ago for some important research into this new field. For years, the Framingham Heart Study has tracked the vital stats and psychological states of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts; researchers have studied this data set for what it says about health habits. But Christakis and Fowler went further. In order to follow up with the Framingham subjects over a period of years, it turned out, the original researchers had asked for the names of family and friends and kept detailed notes of these connections. Christakis and Fowler pieced together these notes to reconstruct the social networks of thousands of connected friends, spouses, neighbors, and siblings. Crunching the numbers from the Framingham health data and using computer graphics, they observed how traits spread through the social network over time: the modern epidemic of obesity advanced, smoking receded to the peripheries, and both happiness and misery appeared to be contagious.

  Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together—happy people prefer hanging out with other happy people—Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself.

  (…)

   

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  • Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus November 22, 2009
    Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus French intellectuals have heaped scorn on a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to bestow the country’s greatest posthumous honour upon the writer Albert Camus, accusing the rightwing president of trying to cash in on the thinker’s popularity with little respect for his politics or personalit […]

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